Boris can’t afford to surrender to the contemptible teaching unions

What is going on? Are the hard-Left education unions actually going to manage to delay the partial reopening of our primary schools? Is the great Vote Leave Government, until now an astonishingly successful establishment-slaying machine, about to suffer its first defeat? Are the Michael Gove/Dominic Cummings schools reforms of the 2010s about to be avenged by a tiny rump of unrepresentative activists convinced that they are refighting the Miners’ Strikes of the 1980s?

Let us hope that it is a clever bluff from the Government, a case of “appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak,” as Sun Tzu put it in the Art of War. Boris Johnson can’t afford the unions to defy him. Schools must start reopening on June 1, and the small gang of selfish activists seeking to derail this must be crushed pitilessly.

This is not an attack on teachers. With the infection rate collapsing, most are keen to return to some sort of normality, as are heads and governors. They miss the children in their care and have done their best to continue to teach them remotely in the chaos of the past few months. They deserve our utmost gratitude. We should ensure that the return to the classroom takes place as safely as possible.

But I strongly object to elitist union leaders who are seeking to sabotage, through undemocratic means, the extraordinarily careful, limited reopening planned by the Government. Theirs is a contemptible ideological act, an offensive, snobbish snub to the millions of workers who have already returned, without complaint, to hospitals, factories, shops, logistics operations and offices.

The prolonged closure of our schools – a move I supported, perhaps mistakenly, at the start of this crisis, when the scale of the pandemic, the forms of social interaction most likely to spread it, and the groups most at risk from the virus were all unclear – is fast turning into an educational, social and economic calamity. Millions of children are not being educated at all, others barely so; by the end of the summer, they could have fallen 12 months behind, forgetting everything they learnt earlier this year.

Others are missing the sport, the clubs and friendships. Some are depressed; many poorer children are going to bed hungry; abuse cases have shot up. The consequences in terms of social mobility, knowledge, productivity, mental health and crime will plague us for years.

The gains in achievement eked out by the Gove/Cummings reforms in the state school sector, and the return to greater rigour over the past 15 years, could be wiped away. We will tumble down the international Pisa league tables, especially if our schools end up shut for longer than those of our European neighbours. The gap between poor and rich is growing again; the private schools, to their credit, are doing far better than the state sector, with some even delivering full, real-time online lessons.

The indirect impact is equally cataclysmic. Parents of younger children cannot work at all, Zoom or no Zoom. Millions of others are house-bound: they cannot travel to shops or factories or hospitals or warehouses. Our economy depends on childcare and schooling for parents to be able to operate, especially with grandparents in confinement. The costs in terms of unemployment will be horrific. Hundreds of thousands of lives will be ruined.

The real critique of the Government’s plans is that they are too modest, given the dramatic decline in new infections, especially outside care homes: Labour should be arguing that schools should be reopening faster. Why isn’t Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, pointing out that his R-rate has collapsed to almost zero, demanding that all schools in the capital be released from lockdown to allow the city he supposedly cares about to start to recover? Instead, the Left, once again, has allied itself with the barons against the people.

It is not as if reopening schools is somehow eccentric. Europe is leading the way, with adaptations for social distancing, without a surge in new infections. It is now clear that almost no children have died from the virus, that they usually suffer far less than adults when they do get it, and that they are unlikely to pass it to adults. Yes, a small number of youngsters have suffered some rare symptoms – but why do the British trade unions believe that what is good for French, German, Danish and Swedish children is too dangerous for British ones?

It’s time for the Government to return to its Vote Leave ways, and launch a proper fightback. This is no longer a “national”, “wartime” Government with mass support that therefore needs to tread in a bipartisan way: politics is fast renormalising. Brexit and Tory voters agree with the Government, Labour supporters and Remainers don’t. Sir Keir Starmer is on the warpath.

Johnson must consider urgent legislation to force all state schools to reopen, drafted in such a way as to prevent any informal boycotts. The growing number of councils that are refusing to comply should lose control of their schools, with all of them turned into academies. This may be the time to wipe away the Local Education Authority model in its entirety. Schools should also be mandated to keep online lessons going for those year groups still at home. The timing of the summer holidays should be reviewed: the school year must either be extended, or the autumn term should start earlier. Every state school should publish a 12-month plan detailing how they will ensure that children catch up.

This crackdown should go hand in hand with leniency in other ways. Parents who are too worried to send their children to school should be allowed to keep them at home until the start of the next academic year. Teachers in vulnerable groups should not be forced to work. The authorities should do everything in their power to minimise risk and pay for plentiful PPE.

But our democratically elected Government has the right to reopen state schools, and the unions no right to obstruct it. Johnson cannot allow himself to be cowed into extending the lockdown yet further. He should show some Thatcherite ankle, and call the far-Left’s bluff.